If you were putting the transition to iCloud off for a while, you might want to take care of it.

Per AppleInsider, MobileMe users now have just 30 days remaining to download their photos and files from iDisk, Gallery and iWeb before Apple’s service concludes.

Legacy MobileMe users began receiving e-mails this week warning that the deadline is fast approaching. The company originally announced a year ago that MobileMe will cease to exist as of June 30, 2012.

The deprecated service, which used to be offered for US$99 per year, has been replaced by Apple’s new, free cloud-based offering, dubbed iCloud. As part of that transition to iCloud, the iDisk, Gallery and iWeb services will no longer be offered.

Before MobileMe goes dark on June 30, users should log in to their account and back up and save all of the content that is stored on the Web in the iDisk, Galleries and iWeb services. A step-by-step tutorial on how to do this was published on Friday by the cool cats at Ars Technica.

For those who want to continue using Apple’s cloud-based services, a MobileMe account must be rolled over to iCloud. The transition must be completed by June 30 for users who want to keep their Apple e-mail account, as well as calendars, working properly.

In April, Apple began attempting to entice users to upgrade to iCloud from MobileMe by offering them a free copy of Snow Leopard. The company has also granted MobileMe subscribers a free 20 gigabytes of storage on iCloud until September.

Apple is expected to announce further enhancements to iCloud later this month at its Worldwide Developers Conference. One report has claimed that Apple will launch a new photo sharing feature, while a beta website that was temporarily available to the public suggested Apple plans to add Notes and Reminders to the iCloud.com website.

If you have any feedback as to the transition, please let us know in the comments.

Per China Business News, Apple this month is reported to have begun production of the first prototypes of its much-anticipated connected television sets at one of its overseas manufacturing facilities ahead of a general production ramp expected to begin late in the 2012 calendar year.

The news, which was attributed to “informed sources”, was picked up and translated by the WantChinaTimes web site earlier on Monday.

In particular, the publication cited its sources as saying that this initial build plan is taking place in one of Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants as a trial production run, which typically produces a small number of assembly-line-quality prototypes for Apple to put through its design test verification stages. No further details were reported.

While Apple’s foray into the big-screen, connected TV business has been a popular topic of discussion amongst industry watchers for several years, few — if any — reliable details surrounding the project have surfaced outside of a claim by the company’s late co-founder Steve Jobs to biographer Walter Isaacson that he had ‘cracked’ secret to a simple HDTV.

Jobs’s vision for a connected TV, disclosed vaguely to Isaacson prior to his passing last October, would see the device synced with all of a user’s devices, and with Apple’s iCloud service.

The simplified HDTV would reportedly spare users from having to use complex remotes for multiple devices like DVD players and cable boxes. More specifically, Isaacson wrote in the best-selling biography that Jobs “wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

Earlier this month, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said his manufacturing firm was “making preparations” for an Apple television, but development or manufacturing had not yet begun. But days later, Gou issued a statement to reporters in which he backtracked on those claims, stating that “[a]ny reports that Foxconn confirmed that it is preparing to produce a specific product for any customer are not accurate.”

The good news is that Apple’s 2012 notebooks seem to be under construction.

The bad news is that this doesn’t really help the regional labor markets.

Per DigiTimes, anticipated demand for Apple’s redesigned line of 2012 MacBooks is reportedly so strong that the company’s Far Eastern component suppliers are facing a labor shortage as they race to produce enough parts to supply the Mac maker’s production lines.

The publication added that the shortages come in the face of preemptive efforts by some of the suppliers to outsource production of their component orders in order to be able to meet the “strong orders from Apple” for the new notebooks, due “in the near future.”

“Component manufacturing plants in eastern China have been suffering from labor shortages for a long time, and although May and June are the IT industry’s traditional slow season when shortage issues are usually not as significant, the strong orders from Apple’s new MacBook are leaving many upstream makers unable to satisfy demand.”

Some of these part suppliers began delivering their first wave of components for the company’s new MacBooks as early as April, with shipments for the notebooks’ new chassis reportedly increasing this month. The supply chain is expected to ramp even faster next month ahead of a ‘possible launch’ of the computers by Apple in July.

In total, DigiTimes said suppliers expect Apple’s total MacBook orders in 2012 to jump from 12.79 million in 2011 to between 16.24 and 19.2 million in 2012 — a run rate that would see Apple sell an average of over 4 million notebook systems each quarter. By comparison, Apple sold an average of 3.2 million notebook systems per quarter in 2011.

The report did not mention anything regarding an updated MacBook Air notebook or a completely redesigned line of MacBook Pros that have long been reported to adopt similar enclosures and design traits.

However, a quick analysis of the production figures outline in the article suggests the sources are referring to combined production of both new MacBook families, as Apple in January reported total sales of 12.87 million notebook systems during calendar year 2011, which roughly coincides with the 12.79 million production figure.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Memorial Day, it’s pretty darn nice outside (sitting in an airport in Dulles, Virginia awaiting a flight back to the Bay area) and there’s no better reason to get some friends, family, your Mac and iOS devices and some tasty food together to celebrate the holiday.

That being said, we’ll be back tomorrow with the latest Mac mobile device news.

Enjoy the holiday, enjoy your friends and happy Memorial Day from O’Grady’s PowerPage

Per AppleInsider, the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) division of AppleCare is allegedly hiring and training new staff on certain aspects of Apple’s upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, possibly hinting that a release date is soon to arrive.

According to an unnamed source familiar with the matter, AppleCare EMEA is hiring a number of new employees who will serve as customer support for the new operating system that has yet to receive an official launch date.

The source went on to say that Mountain Lion may be just a few weeks from launch as internal training recently commenced regarding certain facets of the operating system. Apple usually restricts the operating window of support staff training to a minimum before large product release presumably to avoid leaks.

Though purely speculation, the training could point to a OS X 10.8 debut at WWDC 2012 which is scheduled to take place from June 11 to June 15.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was announced on Feb. 16 with an expected release date of summer 2012. Beyond the basic information provided on Apple’s website, developer previews have revealed that the new OS will offer a bevy of new features like Messages and more comprehensive integration with iCloud that will further blur the line between OS X and iOS.

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If there’s nothing worth watching, then a new HDTV isn’t going to make much sense in the long run.

According to Reuters, sources claim that Apple initiated talks earlier in 2012 to incorporate movie properties owned by movie streaming service EPIX in its Apple TV, with the content possibly in line to be used by the company’s rumored HDTV.

Two unnamed sources have stated that EPIX, a three-year-old movie streaming service created by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, MGM and Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, would offer streaming of much-needed premium Hollywood content to Apple’s set-top box.

One of the sources also said that the agreement would include future Apple television products as well, hinting that the computer giant is indeed planning to release a internet-connected HDTV.

Rumors about the device have been swirling for over a year, though the whispers have so far been here-say and no concrete evidence has been discovered. A recent report claims that the product will be called the “iPanel” and will launch sometime in 2012.

The deal is still in the negotiations phase and an agreement is not expected any time soon. Besides its own streaming site, EPIX is currently beholden to an exclusive US$200 million a year deal with Netflix that ends in September.

Currently on EPIX’s roster of films are “Rango” and “The Lincoln Lawyer,” and Netflix announced that the service will add “Thor” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” soon.

It’s pretty clear at this point: Apple’s not in danger of going out of business.

Per Macworld, on Tuesday, Apple reported a net profit of US$11.6 billion on revenue of US$39.2 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2012. Those are respective increases of 94 percent and 59 percent from the 2011 second quarter. Apple’s profit translates to earnings of US$12.30 per share, up from US$6.40 a share last year; analysts were looking for earnings of US$10.06 a share for the quarter.

All told, Apple tallied record March quarter sales for its iPad, iPhone, and Mac lineups. The company also saw record results for its retail stores during what chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer called “the most amazing March quarter that Apple has ever had.”

It was a big quarter for Apple’s iPhone business as the company launched the third-generation tablet on March 16 and cut the entry level price to US$399 for the iPad 2. While those moves came late in the quarter, Apple sold 11.8 million tablets during the quarter, up from 151 percent in the year-ago period.

In terms of revenue, Apple recorded US$6.6 billion from iPad sales, up from US$2.8 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Following its March 16 launch in the U.S. and nine other countries, the third-generation iPad is now available in 40 countries around the world.

Apple executives also noted on Tuesday that the iPad is extending the company’s reach into new markets. According to Oppenheimer, Apple sold two iPads for every Mac bought by one of its K-12 education customers in the U.S.—and that was during a record March quarter for Mac sales. Oppenheimer also touted the iPad’s presence in the enterprise, specifically citing the U.S. Air Force’s deployment of “thousands” of iPads as technical flight bags.

“The iPad continues to open new doors to customers with whom Apple had no previous relationship,” Oppenheimer said.

iPhone numbers were also strong for Apple during the quarter. The company sold 35.1 million phones between January and March, an 88 percent jump from year-ago iPhone sales and a record for the March quarter. That outpaced the growth of the overall smartphone market, in which sales increased 42 percent year over year.

Revenue from the iPhone grew 85 percent from last year’s second quarter to US$22.69 billion.

In particular, Apple did brisk iPhone business in the Far East. Sales more than doubled in the Asia Pacific and Japan markets, according to Oppenheimer. In China, iPhone sales increased five times from last year, helped by the iPhone 4S’s release in that country in January and the addition of China Telecom as an iPhone carrier in March.

Apple ended the quarter with the iPhone 4S available in 100 countries with 230 carriers offering the smartphone.

Oppenheimer says iOS device sales—which include the iPod touch—totaled 50 million during the March quarter. Apple’s cumulative iOS device sales have grow to 365 million units.

The App Store now carries more than 600,000 apps, with a third of those specifically built for Apple’s iPad.

Mac sales also set a March quarter record. The company sold 4 million Macs, an increase of 7 percent from the year-ago quarter. The entire PC industry grew 2 percent during the March quarter, making it six full years that Apple’s Mac business has outpaced the demand for PCs overall.

Notebooks are still the driver for Apple’s Mac business. The 2.8 million portable Macs sold during the quarter represent 70 percent of Mac sales. Besides illustrating the importance of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air to Apple’s fortunes, that figure could also indicate that Apple’s desktop lineup is getting long in the tooth. The iMac last saw an overhaul nearly a year ago while the Mac mini has remained unchanged since July 2011. The Mac Pro is approaching the second anniversary of its last update.

The Asia Pacific market saw the biggest jump in Mac unit sales, with a 29 percent rise from last year. Other global markets saw single-digit growth in Mac sales.

Apple’s Mac sales may be outpacing the industry growth rate, thanks in some part to the company’s brick-and-mortar retail efforts. Apple says it sold 826,000 Macs at its retail outlets in the second quarter—about 20 percent of all the Macs it sold during the three-month period. About half the Macs sold at Apple Stores were to customers new to the platform.

Speaking of Apple retail, Apple ended the quarter with 363 stores, after opening two new ones in Amsterdam and Houston. Retail revenue of US$4.4 billion for the quarter was up 38 percent from last year. It was the retail segment’s second-largest quarter of sales, behind only first quarter of 2012, which includes the holiday shopping season.

iPod sales continued their decline. Apple sold 7.7 million music players, a drop of 15 percent from the second quarter of 2011. iPod sales actually came in ahead of Apple’s expectations for the quarter, according to Oppenheimer, with Apple choosing to focus on the fact that the higher-priced iPod touch represents more than half of the iPods sold during the quarter. Even with its declining sales, the iPod remains the market leader among MP3 players, according to Apple’s figures.

The company was much more eager to talk about the growth of its iTunes Store, which also saw record revenue of US$1.9 billion during the quarter. That’s an increase of 35 percent from last year’s tally, with music, video, and app sales driving the growth.

Apple executives revealed a few other interesting details about the quarter during their briefing with analysts. The company ended the quarter with US$110 billion in cash—a situation that figures to change in July when Apple starts paying out a US$2.65 per share dividend to shareholders. Oppenheimer said the company would provide more information about that dividend program in July.

iCloud now has 125 million subscribers, after Apple launched the cloud-based service and MobileMe replacement last October. That subscriber base is up from 85 million at the end of the first quarter. It was only in February that Cook was telling investors that iCloud had topped the 100 million subscriber mark.

Apple continues to do a staggering amount of business in China. Cook told analysts the company recorded US$7.9 billion in sales from that country during the second quarter, three times the amount of revenue it took in during the year-ago period. The US$12.4 billion in revenue Apple has seen in China during the first six months of its 2012 fiscal year nearly matches its revenue from that country for all of 2011. Cook credited pent-up demand for the iPhone 4S and strong iPad 2 demand for much of that growth, which is also creating a halo effect for Mac sales in China.

Oppenheimer told analysts to expect revenue of US$34 billion and earnings per share of US$8.68 for the June quarter. That compares to revenue of US$28.57 billion and earnings of US$7.79 per share for the fiscal third quarter of 2011.

Apple’s forecasted numbers would be a sequential drop from the revenue and earnings the company just reported for its second quarter. Oppenheimer said the company is expecting a sequential decline in iPhone sales, as Apple had ramped up inventory to meet pent-up demand. The company was also able to satisfy demand for the new iPad, thanks to a significant supply of tablets. The lower entry price for the iPad 2 and a stronger U.S. dollar are also factors in Apple’s forecast.

Per SecureList, a new version of a backdoor trojan for Apple’s OS X operating system takes advantage of an exploit in Microsoft Word to spread.

The latest variant of the attack known as “LuckyCat” was discovered and detailed by Costin Raiu, Kasperskky lab expert. Raiu found that a dummy infected machine was taken over by a remote user who started analyzing the machine and even stole some documents from the Mac.

“We are pretty confident the operation of the bot was done manually — which means a real attacker, who manually checks the infected machines and extracts data from them,” Raiu wrote in a post.

The new Mac-specific trojan, named “Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a,” uses a Java exploit to infect targeted machine. It spreads through Microsoft Word documents that exploit a vulnerability known as “CVE-2009-0563.”

The new trojan is noteworthy because it stayed undetected for more than a month and a half before it came alive and data was manually extracted from the machine. That’s different from MaControl, another bot used in attacks discovered in February 2012.

There are currently at least two variants of the “SabPub” trojan, which remains classified as an “active attack.” It is expected that new variants of the bot will be released in the coming weeks, as the latest was created in March.

Security on the Mac has been in the spotlight of late as a result of the “Flashback” trojan that infected more than 600,000 Macs worldwide. Apple addressed the issue with a series of software updates last week designed to remove the trojan from affected machines.

The Flashback botnet harvested personal information and Web browsing logs from infected machines. The trojan, which disguises itself as an Adobe Flash installer, was first discovered last September.

Per DigiTimes, a completely redesigned family of Apple’s iMacs due for release later this year will not only arrive noticeably slimmer than existing models but may also be the first of the company’s desktops to feature anti-reflective displays.

The Taiwanese rumor publication has claimed that G-Tech is ramping up its monthly production capacity of cover glass from 1.8 million units to 3 million units in an effort to supply 25% or more of the cover glass for Apple’s new iPad.

The report curiously cites sources in adding that “G-Tech is also expected to supply AR (anti-reflective) glass solutions for Apple’s all-in-one (AIO) PCs with the new products to also serve as a growth driver for G-Tech.”

That would be a first for an Apple desktop, as the Mac maker has thus far only offered anti-reflective solutions as built-to-order options on its MacBook family of notebooks.

Apple’s last major redesign of the iMac arrived in October 2009 in the form of new 21.5- and 27-inch aluminum-clad models with an edge-to-edge glass design. Since then, the company has been working on a pair strikingly slimmer and lighter models that will more closely resemble the footprint of today’s most popular LED televisions according to sources close to the story.

Rumored for an introduction sometime in the second half of the year, the new iMac will help define a trend that will also see several of the company’s other core products adopt slimmer, more streamlined footprints throughout the year, including new MacBook Pros that resemble MacBook Airs and a thinner iPhone.

Separately, Apple has also been working to cut the fat from peripherals that ship with its industry-leading all-in-one desktop, with recent company filings revealing techniques for a new, slim-form keyboard with keys that could have a total travel range of as little as 0.2 millimeters.

Whatever you were expecting the graphics card to be on the next-generation MacBook Pro, Apple might have something else in mind.

Per SemiAccurate, Apple’s next-generation low- and mid-range MacBook Pro models will not feature dedicated graphics cards, and will instead rely on Intel’s integrated Ivy Bridge graphics due to production issues with Nvidia.

Apple has dropped Nvidia’s next-generation Kepler graphics cards from a “large number” of its upcoming notebooks according to the report filed on Tuesday. The change has allegedly prompted Apple to adopt Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs that have higher shader counts, in order to offset some of the lost graphics processing power.

The change was reportedly made because Nvidia “can’t supply enough small GPUs” to Apple and other PC makers. That’s left Apple in a position where its next-generation low- and mid-range MacBook models “are not going to have a GPU, only a GT2 Ivy Bridge,” the report said.

“Nvidia can’t supply, so Apple threw them out on their proverbial magical experience,” it continued. “This doesn’t mean Nvidia is completely out at Apple, the Intel GPUs are too awful to satisfy the higher end laptops, so there will need to be something in those. What that something is, we don’t definitively know yet, but the possibilities are vanishingly small.”

The rumored issues apparently stem from the fact that Nvidia has struggled with its 28-nanometer manufacturing process for its next-generation graphics processors, code-named “Kepler.” As a result, some mid-range MacBooks will feature dedicated Nvidia GPUs, and some won’t, Tuesday’s report claimed.

The same site first reported last November that Apple would switch back to Nvidia GPUs for its 2012 MacBook models. Higher end 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros launched early last year relied solely on AMD graphics, while the entry-level 13-inch model features integrated Intel graphics.

Apple’s next-generation MacBook Pros are expected to feature a radically redesigned exterior, borrowing features from the company’s popular ultraportable MacBook Air. They are expected to be based on Intel’s forthcoming Ivy Bridge chip architecture.